This blog is about using ICTs to develop climate change preparedness solutions built around Energy Internet and eVehicles

Energy Internet and eVehicles Overview

Governments around the world are wrestling with the challenge of how to prepare society for inevitable climate change. To date most people have been focused on how to reduce Green House Gas emissions, but now there is growing recognition that regardless of what we do to mitigate against climate change the planet is going to be significantly warmer in the coming years with all the attendant problems of more frequent droughts, flooding, sever storms, etc. As such we need to invest in solutions that provide a more robust and resilient infrastructure to withstand this environmental onslaught especially for our electrical and telecommunications systems.

Linking renewable energy with high speed Internet using fiber to the home combined with eVehicles and dynamic charging where vehicle's batteries are charged as it travels along the road, may provide for a whole new "energy Internet" infrastructure for linking small distributed renewable energy sources to users that is far more robust and resilient to survive climate change than today's centralized command and control infrastructure. For more details please see:

Monday, May 2, 2011

Electric roads and Internet will allow coast to coast driving with no stopping and no emissions

[Here is a great article on some of the ongoing research with electric roads in Korea and USA. As I have blogged before electric roads can be powered solely by independent roadside windmills or solar panels, owned and operated by small businesses. Rather than using the electrical grid to power the roadway, with its attendant transmission line losses, independent windmills and solar panels can communicate with each other and travelling vehicles as to the availability and cost of power as the vehicle drives by the mobile charging station. More importantly as noted in the article electric mobile charging of roads reduces battery capacity by as much as 80% in electric vehicles. As well the electric vehicle can now be used as a competitive energy transport system to the electrical grid where consumers return home with fully charged automobile that is then used as supplementary power for the home. The beauty of this type of system is that it complements our existing lifestyle and yet eliminates fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. For more details please see http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/. Thanks to Matt Mirandi for this pointer – BSA]
http://www.txchnologist.com/volumes/solar-power-2/electric-roads-could-you-drive-coast-to-coast-without-stopping
Electric Roads: Could You Drive Coast to Coast Without Stopping?
We ask a lot of our cars – heat me, cool me, be silent, be comfy, be exciting and, increasingly, propel me without costly and polluting gasoline. It’s the latter request that confounds, since batteries, the most obvious replacements for gas, are heavy and have limited energy storage.
But what if the energy storage burden was shifted from our overworked cars to the road?
Researchers at the Energy Dynamics Laboratory at Utah State University are working on just such a solution, called electrified roads.
Electric vehicles, or EVs, could pick up small amounts of electricity as they drive over charging pads buried under the asphalt and connected to the electrical grid. Researchers say that a continuously available power supply would allow EVs to cut battery size as much as 80 percent, drastically reducing vehicle cost.

Nicola Tesla first proposed wireless energy transfer more than a century ago.
“Basically you get power directly from the grid to the motors as the car moves,” said Hunter Wu, a Utah State researcher who was recruited from The University of Auckland in New Zealand, where the technology was pioneered, to further develop the concept. “You can travel from the West Coast to the East Coast continuously without charging.”
Nicola Tesla first discovered the principles of wireless charging, or inductive power transfer, in the late 19th Century. It works by creating an electromagnetic charging field that transfers energy to a receiving pad set to the same frequency.
Manufacturers are already marketing wireless charging pads for electric vehicles – retrofitted to accept the charges – that can deliver a 5-kilowatt charge with 90 percent efficiency from a distance of about 10 inches.
There is also a trial application of electric roads – albeit at slow speeds and using very long charging pads – for buses at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, south of Seoul.
But Wu is thinking of something much more radical: charging at interstate speeds. This will require several technical breakthroughs, he said.
“At 75 mph, you’re only going to stay on a pad for about 30 milliseconds,” he said. “We need to turn the pad embedded in the road on and off really quickly.”
The pads would need to be able to signal to each other that a car is coming and the car would also need to communicate its need for a charge, he said.
Wu said the pad must also deliver power even when the car isn’t directly over top of it – a capability called horizontal misalignment that the current generation of stationary inductive power transfer chargers don’t have.
John Boys, a University of Auckland professor who is credited with refining the technology, said it would be possible to transfer up to 30 kW of power at an average efficiency of 80 percent on the highway. Assuming that chargers would be available at home and work, Boys said, a car would only need “a battery big enough to make it to the nearest interstate or major road.”
Wu said the cost of electrified roads, pegged at $1.5 million to 2.5 million per lane mile, could be made up through charging a toll along the roadway.
Not only would the cost of EVs, but range anxiety would be totally eliminated, he said.
“This technology,” Wu said, “would propel EVs forward.”
Top image: Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology electric road trial. Courtesy KAIST

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Bill St. Arnaud is a R&E Network and Green IT consultant who works with clients on a variety of subjects such as the next generation research and education and Internet networks. He also works with clients to develop practical solutions to reduce GHG emissions such as free broadband and dynamiccharging of eVehicles (See http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/) . For more about me please see http://goo.gl/pOpwBView my complete profile